Friday, April 6, 2012

Babar Ahmad – a shameful case of injustice

The disgusting case of the imprisonment of Babar Ahmad is a blight on the British judicial system. He has been held in prison for eight years without ever having been before a court on any charge. Not since the Treason Trials of the late eighteenth century has the principle of habeas corpus been suspended in this manner. Then too it was for unfounded fears – namely that the revolution in France would spread to England – and today it is because there are fears that any Muslim with an interest in current affairs and unjust wars, is a terrorist. The Americans, who have a one-sided extradition agreement with the UK, where suspected American terrorists are not sent here but suspected UK terrorists are sent from the UK to face trial in the United States, have a disgusting recent history of injustice towards suspected terrorists. And they do not have to provide evidence to have a UK citizen extradited.

Guantanamo Bay, the US gulag, or concentration camp, on Cuban soil, has been a prison to nearly 800 suspected terrorists since 2002. How many of these have been tried and convicted of any crime? One. Eight have died in custody. More than six-hundred have been repatriated without trial. Many have been subjected to US torture like water-boarding, often rendered to one of America’s many foreign-based torture facilities, which makes it impossible to have them tried in a US court, since accusations of information obtained under torture is not admissible in a US court. Six have been convicted by military commissions – military trials are not tribunals with any real basis in law but the same kind of kangaroo courts that tried, for example, Saddam Hussein, or soldiers shot for cowardice during the First World War. The latest edict from president Obama’s administration is for Khalid SheikhMohammed to be tried by one of these military kangaroo courts. It is suspected that Khalid SheikhMohammed has been tortured to extract a confession to having been the mastermind behind 9/11. If convicted, Khalid SheikhMohammed, and his alleged co-conspirators, will be executed. This is an easy way to exonerate the US from allegations of torture. Increasingly, however, many people suspect that 9/11 was a false-flag joint US/Israeli engineered destruction of the twin towers and other buildings to create an unnecessary ‘war on terror’ almost a euphemism for ‘annihilating, occupying and stealing from oil-rich countries’.

The United States is the country to which they want to extradite one of our UK citizens, a country where there is no justice for anyone except Americans; a country steeped in racism; a country despised by many who suffer its bases on their soils. Today is Good Friday. 2000 years ago a terrible injustice was perpetrated against an innocent man. Don’t be party to another. Protest on behalf of Babar Ahmad. He is British. Make sure the justice he faces is British too. And make sure he goes to court. As the King’s apologist against republicanism, Edmund Burke, ought to have said but didn’t: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for goodmen [and women] to do nothing’.